Lawsuits were filed against Walt Disney and two other global consulting companies after they allegedly conspired to replace American employees in Walt Disney World in Florida with H-1B visa immigrant workers.
According to New York Times, Leo Perrero, Dena Moore, and another American filed their lawsuits separately after they were in a federal court in Tampa, Fla against Walt Disney, HCL Inc., and Cognizant Technologies. They claim that they are abusing the H-1B program by displacing American employees and replacing them with cheaper immigrant employees.
Perrero and Moore are two of the tech employees laid off in 2014, with many of them replaced with immigrant workers. They also trained their replacement as part of their severance. Most of these new immigrant workers are sought through outsourcing companies, two of which have been named in the lawsuit.
85,000 visas is the quota set by the Congress each year, although, Florida Senator Bill Nelson has proposed a bill to reduce the quota to 70,000. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama also crafted a bill to increase the wage of H-1B workers to $110,000 per year in order to discourage the use of immigrant workers to lower wages.
The lawsuits are based on oath that employers are required to take in the Department of Labor, which Disney recently allegedly broke, stating that the working conditions of the U.S. workers will not be affected by the hiring of foreign workers.
According to The Wrap, Disney also recently expressed their side of the issue saying that it was a misunderstanding of the facts. "These lawsuits are based on an unsustainable legal theory and are a wholesale misrepresentation of the facts", the company said in a statement.
Disney also added that more than 100 employees that were laid off were offered with another job in the company with comparable pay and that it complied with all applicable comparable employment laws. As reported by International Business Times, the H-1B visa is a temporary working visa for foreigners working in special occupations and can last up to three years.
Aside from Perrero and Moore, more than a dozen complaints have also been filed by former Disney employees in the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. Their complaints are also currently being reviewed.
